Being Inappropriate

There's been more than a touch of Captain Oates about my recent blogging.  Apart from the occasional 'circular', I've not blogged any thoughts for a while.  An epic illness was followed by an absolutely mental start to the term.  It's been utterly brilliant, exciting, fun and and flippin tiring -  squeezing out the time to think, reflect and blog.

Anyway, the 'worst' seems to have passed and I need to crack on with various writing projects which are all behind (long-time readers will know it was ever thus), and I also want to get back to the 'fun' of blogging.  I'd like to begin that process by going a little bit off topic (how very me).

I've been struck through contacts and twitter buzz by how much Universities seem to now be addressing social media.  Classes are put on for students on how to use social media - principally Facebook and Twitter - 'correctly'.  A growing number of HE managers are joining Facebook - and with one or two notable, and impressive exceptions , generally follow the corporate style of Tweeting: 'Going to this wonderful event today, all was wonderful...'.  A bomb could go off at the venue and it would be tweeted as 'Bit of a breeze in the venue - perfect air conditioning on this rather wonderfully warm day'.

Personality, and more so any 'controversy' is erased, replaced by a perpetually optimistic, smiling automaton.   The tweets that make these individuals human - stuck in traffic, acoustics at venue hopeless etc are conspicuously absent.  The accounts, and the individuals represented by them seem dull and fake.  It's the resulting concept of authenticity that fascinates me.

Many of you will know that I've long been a champion of Twitter.  It genuinely excites me for the transformative possibilities it offers, but I've noticed that with growing success - particularly in the last twelve months - has come a recalibration of how it is used.  More than one academic colleague (at institutions other than my own) has commented that their own use has been restricted, or at least monitored for 'appropriateness'.  Each of these individuals was an openly gay academic.

Numerous friends and academics have speculated whether I too will need to revise some of my flippant tweets, the occasional drunken innuendo, and frequent rudery mixed in with tweets about law, sexuality, politics and those all important episodes of Strictly Come Dancing, particularly in light of a very different management team, and the loss of those who have supported me in being an 'outrider' on this stuff.

Others - particularly legal scholars - comment that "you can get away with it" - the idea being that I'm curiously privileged in this space - as an out 'gay' man, a queer theorist, a scholar on sexuality, I can be rude.  I can observe if someone is cute or attractive in a way that a straight male academic couldn't make the same observations about a straight female.  I think there's a lot of mileage in this argument - the 'norms' of an openly sexualised male culture are applied, and the de-sexed heterosexual culture similarly applied.  With an evolving homonormative discourse, this too might change - and renders these simple acts curious acts of resistance - thus re-securing them as oddly privileged.

One of the exciting, really compelling, game-changing, paradigm-shifting, epic-defining traits of Twitter is to blend together our various performances.  The ideas of Goffman and Butler are scattered in the wind as identities conflict.  We are sexual, domestic, the worker, the player, the socialising, happy, sad, grumpy; and through this complex pattern of information, we are also a little more true.  A little more authentic.  For a period, Twitter - and many users 'got it', blending the fact they were a lawyer, with an interest in science fiction, or in naked young men.  Sometimes both.

Yet increasingly, there seems a reaction of 'we don't want to know that'.  I am once more separated into Chris 'the academic', Chris who tweets on Strictly Come Dancing, Chris who tweets about law and sexuality scholarship and on we go.

I find such separations not only a failure to seize the exciting possibility to come to a more authentic understanding of who we all are, but I find it next-to impossible for academics.  My vision of academia - the public intellectual - is one in which an academic doesn't cease working.  We are perpetually working, thinking, contributing, researching and teaching.  It's not a 9-5 job.  Work and play are often over-lapping and occupying a complex relationship. This corporate teaching about 'appropriateness' is - it seems to me - fundamentally incompatible with any meaningful academic identity.

So, I shall continue talking and joking, sharing and discovering with sex workers, students, barebackers, bug chasers, safer sex campaigners, porn makers, anti-porn campaigners, politicians on the left, the right, the centre, and of non of the above.  I'll continue to engage with the feminists of all shades, the lawyers, the students, the academics, and the people - particularly the people - who resist being bound by narrow singular labels;  and I'll tell people when I disagree, and I'll get the tone wrong sometimes.  Sometimes I'll upset people. Sometimes, I'll make people laugh, I'll entertain and I might even educate.  Always, I'll strive to simply be me - complex, human, flawed - me.

That's all good and well you might say, but would I really advise a student seeking employment with a Magic Circle firm, that  they should be 'open', and strive for the authenticity I describe above?  Here you have me.  In an ideal world, we would all be open, and strive for a similar authenticity.  However, and as we are frequently told, it is not an ideal world.  We continue to operate in a world whereby we all know certain drugs are regularly used by elites such as those in the legal profession elites, and we know the tales of excess - of one kind or another.  That such excess - known as it is - during ones time as a student could be crippling is rather puzzling.  It is not therefore about behaviour, but the outward projection, our performance if you will, that matters.

My voice however is not a dominant one, and is certainly not one which is winning this debate.  Slowly, but surely, the great hope of Twitter - with all the exciting possibilities it offered - not least for our understanding of sexuality, is being strangled to death like a clipped bird at a pheasant shoot.

Danish entry quits Mr Gay Europe

GayStarNews carries a story this evening which is just frankly bonkers.  According to the news service, 'he Danish entry for this year's Mr Gay Europe has pulled out of the contest in Rome because it is 'too sexual'. Jobbe Joller says he withdrew from the beauty pageant, being held in the Italian capital from 7-12 August, because he was being asked to take part in events which conflicted with his moral principles.'

They point to a statement on his facebook page in which he states:  'I believe that I won Mr Gay Denmark 2011 and was sent to Mr Gay Europe 2012 due to my message that we should be proud and happy the way we are — whether you are homosexual, bisexual, transsexual or anything else in this life.' 'I don't think that I need to put myself in a situation where I need to undress with sexual undertones,' Joller added.

What planet is he living on?  People do not get selected in this pageant events because they have a message that 'we should be proud'.   People win because they manage to combine likability with fuckability.  Otherwise, the winners of these competitions would look more like me than him.

Leaving this - what seems to me - delusional/idiotic assertion by Joller, there is also the idea that it is in some way demeaning to gay men to demonstrate that they might be sexual.  If the only image of gay men is of sexy car cleaners (the scene Joller apparently refused to take part in), he might have a point.  But, the reverse situation  - in which scantily clad car cleaning is banished - is equally as undesirable.  The continued desire by some - such as Joller - to de-sex the homosexual identity is academically fascinating, and personally disturbing.  This embracing of what I've termed the emerging homonormative identity - shaped in large part by the law - threatens to re-closet the sexual in the homo.  Desire becomes restricted to the domestic, the monogamous, the 'good'.   We might have very good fashion sense, but don't whatever you do mention the fact that we have been known to suck dick like a Dyson.

Men must nod sagely, deny the hard-on in their pants and confirm that they selected Joller because of his human rights championing.  Seriously?  It's tempting to assume that attacks on sexual identity always come from the 'straight', the right-wing or the religious extreme, but sometimes we do the work for those very groups.

The Guardian Gay Issue

Don't ever try and edit a post on your iPad.  I managed to delete this whole post earlier when trying to correct a typo.  Huge thanks to Alex who saved me by sending through the original text which is now back below.  Phew!

The Guardian carried a number of 'gay' Tories yesterday as part of their magazine 'gay issue'. A number of people have already commented on various social media platforms that the issue was very gay male focused and I think that's right. Although lesbians were covered (as the reference to 'sleeper-lesbians' demonstrates on the paper header) they didn't seem to be the central focus. Indeed, 'sleeper-lesbians' made them sound like a team of crack terrorists, ready to attack the nearest male meat vendor and disrupt the phallic dildo distribution network. We also had Alan Carr decked out as 'The' Queen on Liz's very own birthday. Republican/gay pride and all that.

Anyway, on to the content. The main piece was by the ever lovely Evan Davis - the openly gay presenter of the popular morning BBC Radio 4 show, Today. He wrote a piece 'Glad to be Gay, Glad to be Tory' which attracted quite a bit of RT action but for me seemed a tad meandering. The central question - which Davis fails to answer - is how such a historically homophobic party has also been stuffed full with homes (at least gay men at any rate). As someone who joined the Tory party at 15 (I'm now a member of the LibDems and a candidate in the local elections) and was also a member of TORCHE (the gay Conservative group before LGBTory) my reasons are as helpful - and as flawed - as any. I was interested in politics and in my neck of the woods that meant choosing between two parties - the Conservatives or Labour. The neighbouring constituency did have a strong LibDem group and so I took a punt and left a message for them as that was were I felt instinctively drawn. Of the other two, I was faced between a choice of a party that seemed to want to tell people what to do, and to treat everyone the same (Labour) verses a party that talked about opportunity, had a leader who genuinely knew what it was to work hard and succeed on your own endeavours and took an approach of giving people more control over their lives. Of course, the following years so the Conservatives drift to the right, and my own views (I think) have remained pretty much in the centre (although maybe more centre left these days). At no point was the issue of sexuality an influence on joining a party. However, I did manage to make the front page of that illustrious Lancashire rag, the Accrington Observer, in 1998 by calling for more people who identified as gay to join the party in a bid to make it more in touch, and more reflective of society. I was forced for resign and as I moved to university, I became disengaged from party politics, working instead first against top-up fees and then for the repeal of Section 28. My story is a personal one but it shows how perfectly rational joining the very party that introduced Section 28 can seem. It is for these reasons of complexity that - I think - Evan failed to find a clear and simple answer to his starting question.

Check out the Evan Davis Tory piece here.

On we move to a piece about gay parenting. I confess, I skim read most of it. This is as far away from my life and interest as reading about straight people and their children. This reaction served as a harsh reminder to me that although we still talk of 'the gay community' - always a problematic label - it is becoming more diffuse than ever before. What did strike me about the piece however were the images. They look very, well, posh. I felt like I was trapped in a Waitrose parenting supplement. I just know they will bore me with talk of granola and skinning holidays in real life. I don't sense any of these kids going to the local rough comp but I could be being entirely unfair. Of course, this is important not as part of some class bashing rant, but because it goes to the heart of our contemporary gay rights discourse. There is an assumption that we can all engage in surrogacy, and create this new families of choice. In truth, many of us - especially men - can't. It's a middle class homosexual activity. The rest of us are looking in, our noses pressed against the glass like some disgruntled street urchin seeking out the promised warmth inside. Oh well, back to the bareback party for the rest of us.

Check out that full piece (and the photos) here.


We also had a mea cupola from someone who tried to 'cure' gay people. The Times (£) also wanted to get in on the act and so the gay columnist - and former Tory MP - Matthew Paris who questions the simple tribe division between 'straight' and 'gay'. He is of course absolutely right in this regard and comes close to applying a queer critique. Unfortunately, he doesn't and instead the piece becomes rather muddled. Nonetheless, it does make a challenging and alternative intervention, worthy of a read.

Mr Gay UK: Samuel Kneen

We have a winner! Samuel Kneen (22) was awarded the title of Mr Gay UK after months of gruelling competition on Saturday.


The contest returned after a three year gap, a return explained by organisers as 'due to popular demand and the extension of social-networking opportunities, giving a new edge this year - the online vote.'

People could vote via the website www.mrgayuk.co.uk, Facebook or Twitter for the guy they felt has the 'cutest face, hottest bod or nicest bum' (none of that high-minded nonsense here). The top five were then invited to the Grand Final, held at Club Mission in Leeds on Saturday 10 December, where Samuel was crowned the winner by the three judges, including Hollyoaks’ Kieran Richardson.

The prizes this year include a professional photo-shoot on location in Morocco, the opportunity to enter Mr. Gay Europe and £2000 in cash so it's pretty good going.  Well done Samuel (although frankly I was surprised the runner up, Charlie Drummond - who was a previous contestant in 2007 and was also in the Big Brother House in 2009 - didn't win).  I guess Drummond was desperate for some extra time on his 15mins of fame but the judges thought it fair someone else had a go in the spotlight.

The competition is a curious anachronism  in the modern homonormative world  -showing gay men as (gasp of air) horny creatures who are looking for the 'cutest face, hottest box or nicest bum' (and presumably those with bulges that resemble an anaconda in a jocks trap).   Presumably winners will have to adopt to our new socio-legal times, and thus I await photos of Kneen with his new partner (via a Civil Partnership) and their adopted first child (or if they have money, surrogate child - currently reserved for posho gays).  The continued presence of this gratuitous 'old gay' contest is political in a way I suspect it does not intend, but how long before legal freedoms prevent such public ogling?  How much longer can homosexual men admit to being sexually aroused by men?

It can surely only be a matter of time before we hear about the soul-destroying nature of this competition, how degrading it is for the men, and the those who watch.  So chaps, ogle while you can, and I shall permit myself to comment that red does rather suit him.  Next year we may be restricted to commenting upon his home-cooking and intellectual prowess.  I really must try and be less cynical in 2012...

Gay Marriage: The Right Perspective

Charles Moore, the right-wing columnist has written an interesting piece in the Telegraph in which he challenges the recent acceptance by David Cameron of same-sex marriage.  Whilst Cameron has cleverly taken the concept of marriage and used it to include homosexuals in a very 'traditional' conception of the family, Moore appears to short-circuit at such ideas and uses his piece to propagate the kind of hateful homophobia that many have to expect from the media of the right.  In case his diatribe against 'tolerance' and homosexuality more generally didn't convince readers, he moves on to include a reference to Muslims (always a sure fire way to have readers in full boggle eyed mode).  He writes:

'...for example, roughly as many Muslims in Britain as there are homosexuals. Muslims believe in polygamy – for men only, up to four wives. Muslims insist that women, just as much as men, welcome this rule. Suppose that Mr Cameron had got up and told his conference, “it shouldn’t matter whether commitment is between a man and a woman or a man and four women”, would he have been able to make the audience clap? Mightn’t they have recognised that a situation in which men were now permitted to marry four women would damage a society in which, until now, one man could only be married to one woman at a time? Wouldn’t they have said that the consent of those involved was not the only issue at stake? Wouldn’t they have been right?'

Now, for liberal loons like me, that's an easy one, yes, polygamy should be 'allowed' and recognised by the state.  Moore reminds us that the 'victories' of gay marriage/same-sex marriage are in fact about the incorporation of homosexuals to heteronormative institutions. These acts of 'progress' are not about a fundamental re-appraisal of the marriage construct, which remains inherently conservative.  As such, these attacks by the likes of Moore can act as a 'smokescreen', creating a reaction among LGBTQ activists to argue for same-sex marriage - if the nuts are against it, we must be for it.

 Check out the full piece here.

(Homo)normative legal discourses and the queer challenge

I promised in the Summer that I would publish my my most recent article on here once it was available.  It's not yet available on Hein but it is here.  I'd appreciate any feedback/thoughts.  I'm aiming to speak further about this work at conferences over the next 9 months but funding is rather tight at the moment.You can make the Slideshare viewer full screen (the arrow icon, bottom right corner of the pane) or if you click the underlined title/link below you will have the option to 'download' (and then print, read more easily) from the Slideshare site.(Homo)normative legal discourses and the queer challenge

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Toxic HIV?

The HIV porn performer Mason Wyler (the marmite of the porn world, and I am firmly in the 'on my toast' camp), recently re-launched his blog (NSFW), and in his latest post talks about privacy and his sex life. He writes: 'I get hit up for anything and everything, by boys next door to boys in porn, as long as it's not privy to the public. Considering that most of these boys live their lives out in the open, tweeting everything they experience from haircuts to hard fucks, it's quite insulting that I get swept under the rug. Even strictly platonic friendships have been relegated to strictly private places [...] I bought into thinking my reputation was so toxic that I would have a detrimental effect on anyone seen with me.'

Here is a very public sexual figure- openly HIV positive and openly a barebacker who continues to have people who want to have sex with him (presumably bb) and who want to be friends but who feel they have to do so privately. Our complex attitudes to HIV and bareback behaviour do not stop it, but they do mean that gay men increasingly must hide behind what I've described as a cloak of legal homonormativity (an article is due out on this theme).

Mason might also want to keep an eye on France and an interesting legal decision this week. Edwin J Bernard reported on his blog that a 40 year old man has been found guilty of administering a harmful substance to one's spouse or common law husband/wife with the consequence of lifelong impairment ("administration de substance nuisible par conjoint ou concubin ayant entraîné une infirmité permanente") for not disclosing his HIV status to a former partner in 1999, who subsequently was also diagnosed HIV-positive. Read the full story here.

A Cultural Hypocrisy?

This piece on The Sword blog (NSFW) caught my attention. It's discussing the forthcoming Palm Springs US 'White Party', a big annual LGBT circuit party. There's a wonderful section in which the blogger writes:

Also, bring some Visine and however much outrage at your lack of civil rights you can muster while coming down off ecstasy because Adam Bouska will be doing one of his NOH8 photo shoots in a hotel, which is perfect for those faggots who like to honor marriage equality and have promiscuous, demoralizing sex all in one weekend. Which photo will be your Facebook profile pic come the Monday after? The one of you with the masking tape over your mouth in a hotel room or the one of you at the NOH8 photo shoot?'

It's partly written in jest but it's also wonderful accurate (although I'd dispute that promiscuous sex is always 'demoralizing'). The blogger's position is essentially the very argument I'm putting forward in some forthcoming work, that gay men increasingly project one life to the heterosexual world - a new (homo)normative conformity - yet it is de-sexed from their lived (homo)sexuality. Put simply, we're happy to talk to co-workers on a Monday about our weekend out in gay clubs, and with our same-sex partner, but less likely to disclose a weekend of slutty anonymous sex. As an idea, this isn't new but I argue that legal reform increasingly focuses upon establishing the new (homo)normative as 'respectable', and in doing so, de-sexing the homosexual. For many non theorists, it simply amounts to mass hypocrisy.